Golden Moth Illumination Deck - oracle decks

Price: US $16.64

ProductID: alt161

The Golden Moth Illumination Deck is a charming divination and inspiration deck of 75 cards. The blue and gold card

imagery is wholly original and is reminiscent of storybook line drawings. Self-published in a limited edition of 300 decks.

Specifications

Name

Golden Moth Illumination Deck

Creators

Aijung Kim

Publisher

Self Published 2012

Deck Type

Oracle Deck

Cards

75

Deck Tradition

Mixed

Card Size

2.17 x 3.25 in. = 5.52cm x 8.26cm

Card Language

None

Back Design

Stylised moth in gold and white on blue

Reviews
years now — since I first pur­chased a copy of her zine,
We Carry Each Other (I later pur­chased another copy
to gift to my mother — it affected me so
pro­foundly). So I was thrilled when she sent a let­ter to her
mail­ing list about a div­ina­tion deck that she had
cre­ated and started a Kick­starter cam­paign for. I didn’t
even hes­i­tate in sup­port­ing the project and a few
weeks ago I received my backer’s award — a copy of the
fin­ished deck.

The deck is so spe­cial. You real­ize this
as soon as you have the pack­age in your hands. Kim
sent a copy of the cards in a sturdy tuck-box, the
hand­book that accom­pa­nies the cards, a spread­sheet
poster, a post­card of her work, a doo­dle and her
busi­ness card to her back­ers. My copy is 83/300. Yes,
there are only 300 copies of this. Go get one now.

Kim
illus­trated 68 cards, but includes seven blank cards (with
encour­age­ment to draw your own sym­bols). The print­ing is
two-color, blue and gold, and the illus­tra­tions are sim­ple
line-style draw­ings. The cards are approx­i­mately bridge
sized and the stock is a thick, uncoated card-stock. You
could rif­fle shuf­fle, but I’m not sure I would. I’d
like to think my pre­cious copy will last for years and
years, but it’s def­i­nitely not a deck for tak­ing to
the pub or read­ing where coffee-cups tot­ter
tena­ciously nearby. So far as I can tell, the box is of the
same stock. It’s lovely to the hand, but feels
ephemeral (beau­ti­ful, mind you — do not hes­i­tate to
pur­chase this deck — but it is delicate).

The hand­book is
another trea­sure all together. While read­ing through it
I real­ized this was entirely hand-lettered. When
this became appar­ent to me — Kim’s lovely hand and
straight lines — my respect for her as an artist went WAY
WAY UP. This is truly a hand­made endeavor.

The
sym­bols are non-traditional and unti­tled. Kim doesn’t
explain the cards in the man­ual, rather she encour­ages
the user to intuit their own mean­ings based on the
con­text of the read­ing. The style one might approach this
deck is sim­i­lar to how a Lenor­mand may be read,
though the Golden Moth’s sym­bols are more abstract and
sur­real than what you’d find in a his­tor­i­cal
car­toman­tic deck. She doesn’t men­tion it in the hand­book,
but the num­bers may be use­ful if you fancy a bit of
numerol­ogy. Kim also includes a spread poster designed
specif­i­cally for the deck and sug­gests other spreads in the
book, along with tran­scripts of sam­ple readings.

I’ve
already used the cards on sev­eral read­ings, com­pletely
sat­is­fied with the results. Though the use of sur­pris­ing,
non-traditional sym­bols requires a bit of flex­i­bil­ity on the
user, the fluid nature of the deck works just per­fectly
for me. If you can look at pic­tures and make up a
story, you’ll find this deck a trea­sure in your
collection.

And finally, I rec­om­mend this deck because Aijung
Kim makes art and it’s good art. And this deck rings
true to the heart of an artist — which is so rare in
the world of div­ina­tory cards, where so many decks
are mass-produced by hired guns. The Golden Moth
Illu­mi­na­tion Deck speaks to me as an artist, as some­one who
could only tell my story through pic­tures that are
mean­ing­ful to me. Kim accom­plishes that and more with this
lit­tle nugget. And you can bet it’ll soon be as rare and
pre­cious as gold itself.